Even presidents must do the paperwork
WASHINGTON As a political reporter, I have been getting a lot of panicked emails and phone calls from my friends about the potential apocalypse that will befall America when Bernie Sanders/Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton/Ted Cruz/Marco Rubio is elected president.
My advice: Fear not the coming election, my friends, because above everything else, Americans love paperwork.
I know everybody says they hate paperwork and “red tape” and bureaucracy, but it is just not true. We love paperwork.
When you graduate from college or high school, nobody asks whether your education was rewarding. They ask if you got the paperwork: A diploma that proves you finished.
Every 16-year-old anxiously awaits the paperwork that allows them to drive legally; gays and lesbians have waged battles in the courts to have the right to the same paperwork straight couples get (even the same tax penalties).
You know how my wife and I know we are married? We have the paperwork. When people were doubting President Obama’s American citizenship, they demanded to see the paperwork.
Paperwork is the guarantor of the fundamental principle of America: due process (in this case, put the emphasis on “process”). Paperwork is how we ensure that everybody has gone through the same steps, regardless of their station in life, regardless of wealth, regardless of social status.
The millionaire’s kid and the janitor’s kid both have to fill out the same paperwork to legally drive.
And the paperwork is also the constraint on individual excesses. I can’t add three stories to my house without a permit, which the city will never approve, and I can’t get the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve the homemade nuclear reactor I’ve been trying to erect in my front yard. My neighbors are very happy.
This works at the national level also. Obama promised his first day in office to close the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, but he hasn’t been able to because he couldn’t get the paperwork approved by Congress.
I first learned this lesson in 1993, when Bill Clinton came to Washington with a pledge to downsize the White House staff.
He quickly realized there was not a lot of extra staff to cut, so he decided to shut down the White House Council on Environmental Quality to trim a few dozen jobs. Only problem was, CEQ had been created by federal law, at the behest of Democrats, to review the environmental impact of big federal projects and policies.
Clinton spent the first several months of his presidency fighting with one of the most powerful Democrats in the House — John Dingell of Michigan — and ultimately gave up. CEQ survives to this day.
Without the right paperwork — passage by Congress, valida- tion by the courts and implementation by some federal agency — no tax will be raised or lowered, no Supreme Court precedent will be overturned, no regulation will be reversed.
Our country was not built to run by executive fiat. It was built to run by paperwork. And the paperwork was meant to ensure that, in most cases, nothing happens at all until everybody has had plenty of time to mull it over.
Whoever becomes president in January will have the ability to change the country in big and small ways. The person can nominate judges, launch missiles, erase prior executive orders, withdraw from treaty negotiations and speak on our behalf all over the world with pretty much no oversight. And it is very likely that about half the country will be horrified by those actions, no matter who wins.
But as long as the paperwork does not change, we are protected from having a president simply waltz in and overturn the institutions that were built over 240 years of democratic process.
So worry about who wins, but worry with a dose of reality. As long as we continue to stand up for paperwork, no president will get a permit to build a nuclear reactor in the front yard of the White House.
Without the right paperwork ... no tax will be raised or lowered, no Supreme Court precedent will be overturned, no regulation will be reversed.